ABSTRACT
Reports of pain without unpleasantness are important for ethical purposes, since pains lacking unpleasantness are less morally relevant on many views, and also for the philosophy of mind, since many theorists have wondered if there is an essentially motivational component that constitutes at least part of the experience of pain. Research on nonhuman animals has purported, in many cases, to show a similar dissociation between the affective/motivational and sensory dimensions of pain. This chapter reviews the importance of understanding the affective dimension of pain for various subdisciplines of philosophy. It describes what is known about this dimension of pain in other species and suggests how this knowledge could impact the understanding of pain in humans. Ultimately, the chapter argues that the main impediment to progress in understanding the unpleasantness of pain is the lack of a sufficiently detailed investigation of cases where humans report feeling pains without finding them unpleasant.
